It would seem that most of the folks, myself included, who started out really hardcore into the pet battling system have slowly lost interest. It’s not because the system isn’t fun. If it wasn’t fun we wouldn’t have spent time leveling 30-75 pets to 25. Even now I will be sitting at my desk and think, “Y’know what would be fun to level? My broom.” and then I get really excited thinking about it.

The issue is that in an effort to get people back out into the world, they opted to place the main burden of that on the pet battle tamers. The pet battle tamers that offer the daily battle quests are spread throughout Pandaria, Outland, Northrend, EK, and Kalimdor. The pandaria master tamers are the closest together but even still take quite a bit of time to get to and battle in order to receive the daily bags which only offer a small chance of getting anything that isn’t a gross hairball or bandage.

But I digress – there’s nothing wrong with the drop rates in the bags. Rather it’s the time investment of getting to all the tamers. At the point where a person is battling the Pandaria tamers on a regular basis, they likely already have multiple 25s and are mainly farming for extra exp or battlestones. We’re not really doing it to “be out in the world.”

After all, there’s a reason all other dailies exist in quest hubs. It’s to make doing all the daily quests a speedy and more enjoyable experience. Compared to regular dailies, the pet battle dailies are about as non-required as you can get. This works for and against them because on the one hand, if you can’t spend an hour flying all over the world to battle the tamers every day – no big deal. But on the other hand, it takes an hour flying all over the world to do all the dailies. That’s not cool.

When you’re a regular player that has to do other dailies, prep for a raid, level alts, or do dungeons or whatever else – those pet battle dailies move further and further down the totem pole until they disappear if a person doesn’t have time for them. There’s also the fact that increased tedium tends to = more boredom.

Now don’t get me wrong, I can only really speak for myself in this case. There’s nothing wrong with the tamers as they are now from the point of view of someone who is going through the initial pet battle questline/achievements. It’s fun to fly out to Outlands and battle all the spread out tamers out there because it’s new and exciting! But as time goes on and you start doing it daily, it’s less new and exciting and more “uggh these flights aren’t even long enough to AFK on.”

So I have an idea! I don’t think they should change any of the Pandaria or old content tamers because they work well where they are, even if the dailies aren’t as accessible. But I think that in a future patch they should add a small hub of maybe 4-5 master tamers that each offer a daily quest. This way the older, spread out tamers are still available for people who like that style of doing the dailies and it also adds an option for people who would like to continue doing some dailies but at a more convenient pace. It’s win-win for both sides because the options are still available for people whether they prefer one style over the other. People who like the travel can get that done and still have more content available in these new tamers and vice versa.

I’ve made jokes on my twitter about a league of shadowy pet tamers, but I think that would apply perfectly here. Once you beat the legendary elite pets that are coming in 5.2, you get an invitation in your character’s mail. You go to a designated, non-faction specific place (in a perfect world, for me, it would be the basement of Karazhan.) and meet with the league. Obviously the first objective would be to beat all of them in static pet battles, the same way you have to beat all the current tamers to unlock the dailies. Once beaten they’d start offering the usual daily quests with the bag reward.

The other idea I’d like to see applied would be for these tamers to switch their pets up daily. But I’d want all of them to have all 3 of the pets on display so people can see what they’re up against before they start the battle. So one day you face the shadowy worgen tamer with her eye of the legion, ghostly skull, and scourged whelpling pet and then the next day she has an enchanted broom, corehound pup, and crawling claw combo instead. This helps keep things somewhat fresh since these tamers would all be within a close distance to each other.

As it gets later into this expansion I don’t see why a daily hub for pet battles would be a bad thing. There’s a certain expectation that as time goes on, more people get into and then subsequently out of pet battles. It’s a lot like the way, towards the end of an expansion, gear becomes more easily acquirable to keep people’s interest. And since the daily bags have such a low drop rate for anything decent, I think being able to access 3 or 4 of them with only a 20 minute investment isn’t that bad.

So uh, yeah. I rarely blog about game ideas that I have because I feel like it makes me look like a silly fangirl. But I figured I’d take the plunge and post it here. I highly doubt anything would come of it, but hey, maybe someday~~~~